Unroll the world’s map and look upon the vast area of the Pacific Ocean — the Mare Pacificum and Mar del Sur of the old time writers, the Great Ocean of Kiwa of the Maori, the realm of romance and home of the Lotus eaters.
Polynesian Voyagers by Elsdon Best
The summer vacation approached. Kate and Steve hitch-hiked to Italy where Maddie now lived. She had gone to Florence to study Pallavicino but in the first week her washing blew from its line on the balcony into the room of the Italian architect downstairs, just like in the movies or sixpenny romances. She had gone down the dark stairwell, carefully rehearsing the Italian for, ‘Excuse me. May I have my washing back, please?’ The young man who opened the door had eyes the colour of cooking chocolate. In his hand he held her blue silk panties and a white lacy bra. He was laughing. He let her stumble through her sentence right to the end, because, he told her later, she was enchanting — her accent was terrible, she could have been asking equally well for a glass of milk or the way to the Uffizi, but she was so beautiful standing there in the dark at the foot of the stairs trying to shape her lips to the expressive outlines of the Italian words. They had married within the year and now lived in a flat a block from the Arno.
‘And I’m so happy,’ she said, hugging Kate and kissing her in the European fashion on both cheeks. ‘Soooo happy!’ Every morning she crossed the Ponte Vecchio and all the shopkeepers emerged calling ‘Ciao bella!’ at her as she passed, with her waist-length snow-blonde hair flying. Their flat was built within the curve that marked the walls of an ancient coliseum. A line of faded slime green marked the place to which the river had risen when it overflowed its banks, indifferent to the fact that this was a capital of culture. In the squares and galleries, Venus drifted ashore upon her cockleshell and the two Davids posed for their photographs above the tour groups waddling like so many ducklings behind their leaders’ umbrellas.
‘They’re too obvious,’ said Maddie. ‘Come and I’ll show you something special.’
The tombs were Etruscan. Husband and wife lay side by side on the couch of their tomb at the eternal feast, their lips curved in secretive connubial smiles. Clearly they had not expected Death, this bony guest who came knocking at their door unannounced and much too early, and interrupted their dinner. Dried wreaths of marigolds had been hung about their necks. They shed their petals like so many yellow teeth.
‘I’ll never go home again,’ said Maddie. ‘Giovanni hates leaving Florence and I don’t want to either.’
She drove them out to a friend’s farmhouse in the country. Stone steps worn at the centre from centuries of contadini feet; a fireplace like a whitewashed cave; creaking wooden shutters thrown open upon rows of vines from which Maurizio made his own wine. Each bottle bore a label: ‘Della Vigna di Maurizio e Tapa’. Tapa was Maurizio’s dog. They picked wild strawberries from between the rows of vines, keeping a sharp eye out for the snakes, thin as bootlaces, that dozed among the prunings and dry grass.
‘What about your mother?’ said Kate.
‘What about her?’ said Maddie.
‘Don’t you worry that she might miss you? I mean, you were all she had,’ said Kate.
‘No I wasn’t,’ said Maddie.
‘But your father …’ said Kate. ‘The accident? The motorbike crushed by the northbound express? The accident when you were only a month old?’
‘All rubbish,’ said Maddie, popping a strawberry into her mouth. ‘My father is alive and well and running a Tegel chicken franchise in Foxton. Mum walked out and left him with two kids.’
Kate stopped picking. She sat back on her heels.
‘You’re kidding!’ she said.
‘Nope,’ said Maddie. ‘I’ve got a brother and a sister. So …’ She shrugs, an Italian shrug. Lips drawn down, hands upturned. ‘I’m not all she’s got. And this is my home now.’ The rows of vines, the warm white stone of the farmhouse, the plain below the village with its borders of poplars. It was all so simple, so orderly compared with the complicated view from the Bella Vista guesthouse on Wansbeck Street.
They ate the strawberries in glasses of Maurizio’s red wine as the sun flared in baroque swags of pink and purple.
‘Remember drinking Cold Duck?’ said Maddie.
Giovanni was puzzled. ‘You drank ducks?’ he said.
‘It was a kind of wine,’ said Maddie, picking a strawberry from her glass. ‘I don’t know why it was called Cold Duck. We thought it was so sophisticated, didn’t we, Kate?’
‘Yes, we did,’ said Kate, and she laughed too at their simplicity. The strawberries had grainy skins. They popped on the tongue, releasing a tiny shot of sugary juice. Truth to tell, Kate would have preferred fat berries with whipped cream and spoonfuls of icing sugar, but that would have been an admission of naivété. Those were the kind of strawberries favoured by people who would like Cold Duck. The sun set over blue hills like the hills glimpsed through the windows of paintings of the Madonna: hills through which a white road winds toward a distant plain. They had come so far along that winding road leading from Cold Duck to Maurizio’s own vintage.
When the Dromedary went to the Bay of Islands, the maiden followed us over-land, and again taking up her station near that part of the vessel in which she supposed her protector was imprisoned, she remained there even in the most desperate weather and resumed her daily lamentation for his anticipated fate until we finally sailed from New Zealand.
Journal of a Ten Months’ Residence in New Zealand
by R.A. Cruise
Her mother wrote: How nice for you to meet up with Madeleine! Her mother tells me she seems quite happy over there. I saw her down town only last week at the Farmers’ sale. Must close as it is nearly 5 o’clock and I must get the tea on. Lots of love. PS Do remember to boil the water when you’re travelling, won’t you? Mrs Craddock spoke at the Spring Afternoon at Church about their trip. She said that everyone else on their tour came down with tummy bugs in Italy. The food was terribly rich and did not agree with them. She was very careful with what she ate and never drank anything but boiled water and she was the only one who did not have any problems.
The printing was squashed around the edge of the main text, up the right-hand margin and upside down across the top. Kate tracked the text. The aerogramme featured a photo of the Treaty House at Waitangi. One arrived with absolute regularity every Friday, written and posted on a Sunday afternoon.
I saw Mrs McFadden outside the butchers last Tuesday. She tells me Heather is moving to Napier. She’s had a baby (boy, 8lb 12oz). I think she said his name was Craig. It was a difficult birth evidently, but mother and babe both well now!
Oamaru, it seemed, was full of mothers, who met one another on the street and exchanged news of their daughters: Maddie in Italy, Caro in Auckland, Kate in England, Virginia Craddock who was studying volcanology in Hawaii, Marilyn Rasmussen who was in the navy, all the daughters who had flown and come to roost elsewhere.
The mothers write about people their daughters can scarcely recall any longer. Their faces have begun to melt into one another. The mothers mention names that their daughters begin to confuse. They cannot quite remember who has married, who has had a baby, who has moved elsewhere. Kate’s mother encloses clippings from the newspapers: a news story about someone Kate vaguely remembers from kindergarten or horror stories about overseas: an earthquake in Turkey; a bomb blast in Belfast.
You will be careful won’t you? Kate’s mother writes. But I’m nowhere near Turkey, replies Kate. And I’m not planning on going to Belfast in the near future.
The mothers meet and chat with their bags of shopping and the dog tugging at its leash, outside Mr Budd’s dairy, or over the counters full of sale-price lingerie at the Farmers’, and they weave the web that tweaks, ever so gently, at their children’s ankles.
Kate did not write as regularly. It was too difficult. She sent postcards of the Duomo, the Eiffel Tower, San Marco, the Little Mermaid. There was only room on the reverse for Well, here we are in Florence/Copenhagen/Paris/Venice! Having a great time. Saw … and there followed a resumé of things seen and places visited. No mention of the woman on the Lido who stripped off all her clothes and stalked grandly up and down shouting ‘Scheisskerl! Arschloch!’ until her husband lunged at her and the two of them struggled, tumbling to the ground with hands gripped about each other’s throats in some dreadful murderous marital rage. A ring of outraged Germans had formed about them. ‘Ruhe!’ they said. ‘Unverschämt!’ The woman’s legs, Titian-plump, kicked, exposing a shock of startling red pubic hair.
No mention of the man who pulled a gun on them in the tenth arrondissement. He had seemed almost bored as they fumbled in their pockets for money, and when they had handed over what they had, thanking God the traveller’s cheques were safe in Steve’s left shoe, he said, ‘Merci.’ ‘Merci, m’sieu, ma’mselle,’ then he left, walking briskly as if he had an appointment elsewhere and was running just a trifle late. No mention of drinking wine in a camping ground near Paris, so gloriously cheap at two francs a bottle, nor of becoming lost on their way back to their tent, nor of waking under an elm tree to a bleary Monet of a morning, the Seine glinting in a multitude of dabs of pearly colour.
Nor any mention of staggering about a room in Denmark with some students, drunk this time on schnapps, which left the body incapable but the brain curiously detached. They staggered two steps to the left, arm in arm, someone’s hand groping at her bum, then a step to the right. They were singing some lugubrious Faroese ballad of at least ninety-four verses. No mention of throwing up twice in the tent afterwards, nor of the decision to move the tent, nor of the tent taking on a mind of its own once partially dismantled so that it seemed simpler, after all, to sleep where they were; nor of waking soaked with dew. Wet green grass, a cow licking her face with its big soft heavy tongue, its soft brown eyes like a lover’s only an inch or so from her own.
No mention of the cave near Trieste where they walked along a slippery path beside a river into the interior of a hill. Among stalactites and stalagmites stage-lit in red and blue stood a little fish tank. A sign in several languages said that the creature it housed was the Human Fish, Le Poisson Humain, Der menschliche Fisch. The Human Fish’s little swollen head blindly nudged at the glass, its pink hands fought for a grip on the sheer surface, its tiny feet paddled about seeking a way through to the dark river that churned at the tourists’ backs, surging from one crevice to disappear into another and filling the air with its deafening roar. They stood watching the little pink foetal fish, hearing the sound of water, which could have been the sound of blood rushing in the ears. Then the guide waved her torch and the tourists straggled on to the waterfall signposted as Lover’s Leap, La Corniche des Amoureux …
She mentioned nothing, in other words, on the reverse of the great sights of Europe, of anything that moved her, or caused her to laugh afterwards, or grimace, or feel slightly ill. Nothing, in fact, that she would tell a friend.
Her parents seemed so very far away. At Christmas her mother sent a tape, painstakingly assembled with many stops and starts and promptings.
Helloooo, deeearr, she said.
Did she always speak so slowly? Did she always roll the ‘r’ so markedly? She sounded foreign.
Bernard came to visit your father last month and brought us this tape recorder so we could send a message this year. He tells me it’s what people do these days instead of cards. Click. Scratch. Click. How are you? We’re both well. Click. Click. Long pause. Ooh — I think this is going. Is it going? Can you hear me? Click. Click. Yes, well, we’ve had a lovely summer so far. Not too much rain. Click. The tape trailed off after ten minutes of hesitant report on the garden, a brief account of Auntie Annie’s operation for varicose veins, and a resumé of the talk at this year’s Spring Afternoon, which had been about smuggling Bibles into Russia. Click. Click. Well, I can’t think of any more to say, said her mother. But Happy Christmas. We’ll be thinking of you. Lots of love. Bye … Her voice trailed away into silence. She did not know what to say either.
When Kate rang home, feeding shillings into the phone on the Turl, their voices counted each other out, colliding midway like two bodies fighting to get through a narrow doorway …
‘What time is it over there?’ said her mother, at the same time that Kate asked how they both were.
‘I’ll get your father,’ she said after they had compared the time and the weather and established the exact cost of the call.
There was some fumbling and muttering and then her father came on the line. On the phone his voice still bore a Scots lilt.
‘How are you?’ said Kate.
‘Not bad,’ he said. ‘Have you got me any books?’
A Young Woman of Otaheite, bringing a Present.
A Canoe of the Sandwich Islands, the Rowers Masked.
A Night Dance by Women, in Hapaee.
Captions to engravings in A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean by Capt. James Cook and Capt. James King
When Kate first arrived in England she had been unable to read. Three years of study had left her with acute literary indigestion. Reading induced a kind of nausea. But she continued to visit bookshops to buy books for her father, scouting through piles of dusty volumes for the Pacific. She found him a copy of Cruise’s Ten Months’ Residence in New Zealand, a book with tattered covers about the everyday life of the Patagonians, another about Easter Island, a book about Polynesian methods of navigation. For five pounds she picked up a volume of engravings of Cook’s third voyage, unbound but complete. They had been lying on a table in a dusty corner. She had to lift them closer to the light from the little square-paned windows that opened onto a narrow alleyway.
The light falls, pale and northern, on grey images of palm trees about lagoons where canoes slip over grey water. Grey men paddle a canoe, the muscle of shoulder and torso delineated as carefully as if they were Gaulish warriors. These men have travelled across the ocean tracing starlight and the journeys of gods. They have followed currents and winds, clouds and the flightpaths of land birds and the trails of luminescence emitted into the ocean by islands.
Grey sailors in tricorne hats sprawl before a group of women dancing in exquisitely engraved firelight. Light catches the graceful curve of an upraised arm, the bare breast, the sheen of oiled skin. The crew have their backs to the artist but you can sense the excitement, cocks stiffening against nankeen: these dancers are women any ordinary sailor could fuck in exchange for a nail.
It’s a lie, of course: the tiny squirt of disease is already at work, breeding beneath the skin. A chief’s son lies in irons on the Resolution for stealing one of the ship’s cats. Behind the sailors’ backs, beyond the rim of firelight, stalk resentment and mistrust. Kate has read since that those dancers were intended as distraction. While Cook and his men sprawled at their ease, the islanders intended to avenge the insult to their chief’s son by killing the Englishmen and seizing their ships. They had that day witnessed English sailors soundly defeated by island boxers in the arena, they had seen English marines fumble in their drill and fire their muskets missing the mark. They seemed, wrote Cook in his journal, to pique themselves in the superiority they had over us. To recover some reputation, he ordered the gunner to prepare a fireworks display that evening. It was successful. The islanders were impressed. The assassination never eventuated. The sailors in the engraving owe their lives to fire-serpents and flowerpots, sky rockets and water rockets that could travel a distance underwater before bursting forth to explode in a shower of sparks.
There is no hint of that in the engraving: simply grey firelight, the mesmeric sway of grey palm trees, the garlands of grey flowers in the dancers’ hair.
Kate stood in the grimy bookshop where the owner sat at a desk, sniffing from hayfever, dust allergy or the beginnings of a summer cold and writing with pen and ink. She could hear the regular sniff sniff sniff and the careful squeak of the pen. She looked at the engravings. They reminded her of the National Geographic. She has a memory of children giggling on a wet afternoon at Millerhill and the Divali woman veiling her face in an attempt to hold the camera at bay. A Young Woman of Otaheite brings a gift to Captain Cook and his men. She walks toward the observer, smiling coyly with one hand raised charmingly to her cheek, like some antipodean, barefoot Pinkie, white muslin dress and ribboned bonnet replaced by a crinoline of tapa cloth that leaves one breast bare. The hands are elegant, the bare feet pointed. Another young woman dances wearing a starry hat and a bustle of pleated cloth. She smiles also at the observer. The engraver has captured the softness of her skin as cleverly as he was able to capture the gleam of northern snow or the glow of firelight, but the Divali woman was right to be suspicious.
The images of the engraver were grey, filtered through steel. Kate stood in the shop and was overwhelmed suddenly by a longing for what was absent: for colour, for blue and green and white, and for that brilliant, unflinching Pacific light. She longed for the white sand of an empty beach on a clear day, for the sound of waves breaking after they had crossed thousands of uninterrupted miles onto white sand, not the fret of channel water on shingle; for sand dunes and white gravel roads; for the jagged rim of mountains; for braided rivers milky with snow melt; for the scent of sheepshit and muddy paddock; for the tang of sea salt not diesel; for a whole host of sensations that she had not even known she was missing.
As soon as we had reached the limits of perpetual snow, my two native attendants squatted down, took out their books and began to pray.
Travels in New Zealand by Ernst Dieffenbach
New Zealand became the world imagined. She began frequenting the library at Rhodes House, that chunky monument to imperial ambitions and corporate greed, gone all respectable now with gardens and polished wood and no longer strained with the mess and mayhem of the new empire taking bloody shape in Vietnam. In the moderated hush of the library, Kate began to read again, and for the first time she read about her own country. Missionary accounts, explorers’ tales, journals official and unofficial. She read Dieffenbach’s account of the ascent of Taranaki, with Heberley the whaler for a companion. Sustained by maize cakes baked for him by one of ‘E Kake’s’ female slaves and with some flowers in his pocket that he identified as a viola, a primula, ranunculus, myosotis and a daisy, he reached the summit, where the pair were immediately enveloped in dense fog. Dieffenbach nevertheless set to try the temperature of boiling water with one of Newman’s thermometers and found it to be 197, the temperature of the air being 49 that taking 55 as the mean of the temperatures at the summit and the base, would give 8839 feet as the mountain’s height. The European stood in the fog on a sacred peak, discovering numbers and facts — and, incidentally, the skeleton of a rat.
The lights came on mid-afternoon and she walked home along the streets of Oxford among all the other young Dieffenbachs in their greatcoats and knee boots shuffling through the fallen leaves of trees whose names — elm, beech, oak — she knew better than she knew the names of the trees in her own country. Where did she belong in all this?
On the lofty peak in the fog of experiment?
Among the New Zealanders on the lower slopes reading their books?
Where am I? Who am I?
The day is early with birds beginning and the wren in a cloud piping like the child in the poem, drop thy pipe, thy happy pipe. And the place grows bean flower, pea-green lush of grass, swarm of insects dizzily hitting the high spots, dunny rosette creeping covering shawl cream in a knitted cosy of roses …
Owls Do Cry by Janet Frame
It had not been necessary to read New Zealand literature at university. The New Zealand authors taught were Sargeson and Glover, and they made their appearance as a kind of savoury afterthought following the main course, which was substantial Wordsworth and hearty Dickens. Kate had consulted them briefly: a cat was dropped into the fire in a coal range by a monosyllabic moron, while the poems were about swaggers and beetled seamen and a woman shopping:
In her basket along the street
Rolls heavily against her thigh
The blood-red bud of the meat.
There had been something brutal and foreign and repellent about New Zealand literature. It was as sticky as Baxter dipping his wick on Castle Street. He had been too old to possess a viable wick. He had been grubby. When he had delivered a couple of lectures on New Zealand poetry he hunched over the lectern, fixing the few rows of students who bothered to attend with a bleary eye and speaking with a slow, deliberate emphasis. But it did not matter. You did not have to remember what he said, nor read Sargeson or Glover. You could safely bypass New Zealand literature altogether, for all you needed to pass the exams were Fair seed time had my soul, and I grew up Fostered alike by beauty and by fear and Whan that Aprill with is shoures soot and a selection of images of blood and fire from Macbeth.
Kate had known of Owls Do Cry, of course. She had known about Janet Frame. Janet Frame came from Oamaru. Her great uncle or cousin-once-removed had married Kate’s mother’s second cousin. Or something like that. That was what Kate’s mother had said. He was brainy. He had invented a special light for railway engines that shone around corners but he had been duped by the manufacturers and never made a penny from his invention. Or something like that. The disappointment disturbed him. He became difficult. He took to the drink. Or something like that. The marriage had not lasted.
Janet Frame was a writer, but not as famous as Oamaru’s other writer, Essie Summers, whose husband was the minister at Weston and whose books sold by the million overseas. Janet Frame had lived in a house near the Botanic Gardens, in one of the wild gullies beyond Sequoia gigantea and Fagus sylvatica, which the Adventure Club had made its mission to explore on Saturday mornings. Janet Frame had gone mad. Cracked up. Broken down. She had ended up at Seacliff, that dark castle over the hill from Millerhill where the mental people lived. Like Kate’s Uncle Tom, who had to be locked up for their own good.
Essie Summers wrote happy books that people liked and were prepared to pay sixpence a time to read. Janet Frame wrote uncomfortable books. It was said that real people featured in her books. Recognisable people like Maddie’s grandmother, Mrs Greenleaf, who ran a corner dairy and gave the children in one of Janet Frame’s books sweeties. Sometimes Janet Frame had been less kind. Teachers at Waitaki had been ridiculed, people who deserved greater respect. And doctors at Seacliff, who had only been trying to do their best, and were not at all the bullies they were painted as. Of course they had been upset when the dark castle caught fire. But what did Janet Frame want? Did she think that people who had cracked up, people who were not all there, who were mental, could be let loose to wander at will about the hills, singing and carrying on and looking in the windows of farmhouses where normal people were getting ready for bed or listening to the radio? Was that what she wanted?
Kate read Owls Do Cry in Oxford. She liked the roses around the dunny on the first page. There was a teacosy sweetness about the roses. She went on to read with a sickening sensation of recognition. The dump where Francie burned was the dump she and Maura had raided for old telephones to pull to pieces and springs on which they had attempted fantastic feats of flight across the neighbours’ fence. The woollen mill was the mill they drove past sometimes in the scarlet Standard, and the little shovel scoop of Friendly Bay was where she had sat with her sister waiting for their jellyfish to melt in the sun. The hospital, where Daphne and the women waited in their red dressing gowns for nine o’clock and the terror of shock treatment, was a Gothic version of the place they had visited to collect Tom for his Sunday dinner. Was this the horror to which he returned after lamb and mint sauce?
See. Forget. Go blind.
A smell hung about the book: the cabbagey pong of human confinement, a menstrual stink, the reek of rotting fear that is also the sweetness of dunny roses. There was anger in the text, and a stern rebuke. This was the unmistakable sound of the Kelveys having their say at last, and it was not calculated to reassure. Lil was saying to all the world, ‘This is how it felt. This is how it was for us, the stinky kids. We weren’t sweet, we weren’t satisfied with our glimpse of the little lamp. You might have thought we had been comforted, but that was as it was reported by the writer occupying the escritoire in the front room of the big house. This is the dark truth of the washerwoman’s cottage.’
Toby looked over at his mother. She had a piece of butter paper in her hand and was greasing the girdle for the pikelets that would be made on the coal stove, the batter dropped in spoonfuls on the smoking girdle, and rising and bubbling and browning and being thrust quickly to sweat under a warm folded tablecloth. Amy Withers always made pikelets for peace …
Owls Do Cry by Janet Frame
There was the butter paper and the girdle, for the first time. There were the pikelets and the coal range. Kate wanted desperately to escape the book, to close the door on that airless room and run away. But the story had her by the wrist and it was saying what it had to say with such appalling beauty that she was caught. She had to read it in one breath, right to the end where Bob Withers sat in the Old Men’s Home built on the Cape and all day and night the inmates moved within sound of the sea. And Bob was deaf, and he sat alone, and slobber trickled down his chin, and his voice had grown thin like a thread, and the day burned on him as hot as the stove ready for pikelets if there were anyone in the world to make them.
She had to read it all, because the Old Men’s Home was the place where she had polished the windows and she knew what lay outside: the wide blue of the Pacific and the complicated little settlement that had planted itself on its shore.